Not much has yet been written about the quasi-adversarial relationship that obtains between consumers and the companies from which they buy goods and services, at least not in those terms.

And it’s clear, I think, that the relationship is quasi-adversarial. In game-theoretic terms, it’s a ‘mixed motive’ game — one in which cooperation of some form is useful, but in which each party has some incentive to deviate from maximally cooperative behaviour. When Apple sells me a computer, they would ideally like to squeeze as much money out of me as possible, while giving me a product as cheap-to-produce as possible. And my own preferences are the exact opposite. We both benefit from doing business together, but our interests in the interaction are not quite aligned. In fact, in terms of pure dollars and cents, the transaction between Apple and me is a zero-sum game: every extra dollar they charge for their computer is a dollar out of my pocket and into their corporate coffers. It’s not a fully-adversarial relationship, but it’s still one that needs some rules to keep it civilized.

In this regard, it’s good to know about the legal concept of ‘uberrima fides‘. This is a legal doctrine, relating specifically to insurance contracts, which says that “all parties to an insurance contract must deal in good faith, making a full declaration of all material facts in the insurance proposal.” The relationship between insurer and insured, in other words, is a game that must be played by very strict rules.

The concept of uberrima fides doesn’t mean the insurer and insured are on the same team, metaphorically speaking. So it implies a relationship quite different from, say, a fiduciary one. A fiduciary relationship, as a famous legal judgment once put it, requires “the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.” In a fiduciary relationship (e.g., the relationship between lawyer and client), the commercial aspect of the relationship takes a back seat, and one party (e.g., the lawyer) is expected to put the other party’s interests ahead of their own. In a relationship subject to the uberrima fides standard, the relationship is still at least partly adversarial, but the adversaries in question are expected to play very strictly according to the rules. This makes particular sense for the relationship between insurer and insured, presumably, because both parties are so highly vulnerable to gamesmanship and dissimulation on the part of the other.

This suggests, I think, that we think of various kinds of buyer/seller relationships as existing along a spectrum, from the aggressively adversarial to the utterly fiduciary. The question, then, is not which rules should apply to buyer/seller relationships in general. The question, rather, is which rules should apply to what kinds of buyer/seller relationships, and why.

The scandal currently engulfing Football’s New Orleans Saints illustrates some important points about adversarial ethics, and in particular holds lessons for business ethics.

The scandal concerns the fact that over a number of years, members of the team (and at least one assistant coach) maintained a “bounty pool,” which paid out money to players who succeeded in inflicting serious injuries on players from opposing teams. Football is a tough sport; so what’s the problem?

The problem, of course, is that even tough games need rules, including rules designed to keep the game worth playing.

Drawing on Joseph Heath’s work on adversarial ethics in business, I argue that the limits on adversarial behaviour in business can be defined as those limits that keep the ‘game’ beneficial from a social point of view. Free, competitive markets are enormously beneficial, and behaviour that threatens the benefits of markets robs them of their moral justification.

Some professors go into politics. Some politicians later become professors. But is there any reason to think the rules of the two “games” should be the same?

See this article by David D. Perlmutter, in the Chronicle of Higher Education:Why Politicians Should Be More Like Professors. Perlmutter points out that President Barack Obama has sometimes been accused of being “too professorial.” But just what, asks (Professor!) Perlmutter, is wrong with that? He suggests several ways in which it might actually be good if politicians adopted a more professorial demeanor. His final suggestion is that politicians need to be more like professors in their willingness to work together to solve shared problems. “More than in any other trade, professors will sit down, work together with people with whom they hold deep ideological differences, and get the job done.” As for politicians: “It’s fine to be partisan about ideas,” he says, “but governing must be collaborative.”

By way of prescient rebuttal, see this piece by our friend (and sometime professor) Andrew Potter, writing in the Ottawa Citizen:Gangster Politics.

In a philosophical debate, what everyone involved is trying to get at is the truth. As a result, each party has a vested interest in the discussion remaining as rational and free of bias as possible. Even better, the truth is what economists call a “non-rival good” – many people can partake in the truth at the same time without anyone’s share being diminished.

In contrast, what is at stake in the political realm is not truth but power, and power (unlike truth) is a “rival good” – one person or group can wield power only at the expense of another.

Unfortunately, the very essence of politics makes partisanship inevitable….

In general, if you’re going to propose new norms for a game, it’s good to have a clear understanding of what is really at stake in that particular game, first.

Over at my Food-Ethics blog, I just posted a short piece called “Caution on ‘Green’ Claims for Organics”. It’s about a suggestion, from the head of a UK farming organization, for organic farmers to be cautious about claims that their produce is, categorically, more environmentally-friendly than non-organic foods.

The interesting thing from the point of view of adversarial ethics has to do with the role of industry associations. Industry associations are a mechanism by which businesses that would normally compete against each other engage in certain forms of cooperation. The catch is that some forms of in-group cooperation are socially beneficial (or at least innocuous) while others are pernicious. For example, when companies cooperate on standard-setting (so that, e.g., competing models of computers can all use the same peripherals), that’s a good thing. When they cooperate on prices, that’s called price-fixing, and it’s bad for consumers (and is illegal in most places). In the case cited above, the organization is calling for a stop to in-fighting over the virtues (in the strong, moralized sense of that word) of various products. Whether that’s socially beneficial depends, in part, on the significance of the moral debate that the organization is hoping to stifle.

Any time standards are established for the production of some product, and if money can be made by skimping on those standards…well, skimping is liable to start happening. Nowhere is that worry more obvious today than in the realm of organic agriculture.

The brunt of the problem is with overseas farmers who sell much of the certified-organic food in the domestic, American and Canadian retail markets. Who’s watching them? Well I’ll tell you. for the most part, they’re watching themselves. And they undercut American and Canadian organic farmers like Thoet four times out of five.

Clearly, if people in China, Mexico and Indonesia are cheating, we need to start field testing on a surprise basis to weed them out. I’m not sure why exactly that message bothers some organic farmers, like Thoet, but the good news is that the overwhelming majority of organic farmers in North America agree completely….

Notice here the multi-layered competition:

American organic farmers are competing with each other;

American organic farmers are competing with with American non-organic farmers;

It’s also worth noting that, perhaps less obviously, American organic farmers are competing with American farmers who adhere to a “nearly organic” method of farming, but who do not or cannot meet the standard necessary to gain the regulated designation “Organic.”

In each case there’s a competitive environment, subject to a more-or-less formal set of rules; and in each case, the opportunity exists to break rules, or to game them in various ways. Notice also that, when one sees oneself as playing several separate games at once, one has in principle the opportunity to justify cheating at one game by appealing to the rules of the other games. (For instance, “Yes I know I was bending the rules for USDA Organic, but it’s more important that we beat out imports from Indonesia!”) Does this happen in practice?

Last week there was some controversy over MTV’s “edgy” teen drama, “Skins.” I’m quoted giving a business-ethics perspective on the show in this story, by the NYT’s David Carr: “A Naked Calculation Gone Bad.”

What if one day you went to work and there was a meeting to discuss whether the project you were working on crossed the line into child pornography? You’d probably think you had ended up in the wrong room.

And you’d be right.

Last week, my colleague Brian Stelter reported that on Tuesday, the day after the pilot episode of “Skins” was shown on MTV, executives at the cable channel were frantically meeting to discuss whether the salacious teenage drama starring actors as young as 15 might violate federal child pornography statutes.

Over at my Business Ethics Blog, I focused on the way the Skins controversy serves as an example of how a kind of corporate group-think can end up producing a product that might, on second thought, not be such a good idea.

But it’s also worth noting (for purposes of this blog) that TV is fiercely competitive. Viewers generally benefit from that competition, as in any industry, but there are limits on competitive behaviour. What are the relevant limits, here? TV is relatively loosely regulated. The Federal Communications Commission does regulate TV (see their rules here) but their main focus is on avoiding ill-defined “indecency.” But their process has to begin with objections from someone in the community. And what we take to be “indecent” is surely evolving, a fact that broadcasters are both subject to and contributing to. Something more like “bright line” might be found in child pornography laws, the spectre of which has been raised in the controversy over Skins. But even there, there’s plenty of room for interpretation, and plenty of room for broadcasters, in a competitive game, to play along the edges of the rule.

Over at my Food Ethics Blog, I’ve just posted a short entry on regulating competitive behaviour in the dairy industry: Using, Regulating and Testing for Antibiotics in Milk. The key point, there, from the perspective of ethics for adversaries, lies in looking at the obligations that competitors have to those they server (consumers of milk, in this case) compared to the obligations they have to other members of society. In sports terms, it’s the comparison between what a baseball team owes its fans, versus what it owes to people whose windows might be smashed by a stray ball.